Gwyn Prins

On condis and coolth

Abstract This essay is about the cultural as well as the technical origins of societys large-scale conditioning of air. It argues that by the application of semiotic and anthropological analysis, it is possible to use air-conditioning as a particularly efficient instrument with which to investigate some basic features of modern American culture. The essay argues that air-conditioning is essentially like an act of potlatch of which modern American quick food cuisine is another important example. It also suggests that the desire for air-conditioned air is addictive, with important consequences in moral and political philosophy as well as for the strategic minimum energy requirements of the Republic. The essay concludes by suggesting that the same cultural and technological roots in American history which created the addiction to coolth also contain the means to move on to cleverer, more environment-friendly “post-coolth” technologies.

Public medicine and global security: the challenge and the opportunities.

The new discipline of Global Security Studies is defined as the consideration of transnational issues with global implications that can only be solved by collaborative endeavour. There is a need for new thinking leading to actions for a sustainable future. An analogy is drawn with the preventive activities of public health medicine, and the opportunities presented to Medical Action for Global Security are examined.

“What is to be done? Burning questions of our movement”

Abstract The paper suggests that a danger which faces the integrated study of health and medicine in Africa is a failure to attend closely enough at this early stage to the differences in concepts and taxonomies originating in each contributing specialism. This is because the new division of the subject which accompanies an integrated perspective upon it no longer follows the division of labour which used to be, broadly, between disciplines. So as those stark but comforting contrasts blur, it is important to keep hold of a robust and usable conceptual apparatus if we are to avoid deep confusion. Therefore, preferring to risk oversimplification rather than precocious complication, each of the three contributing disciplines—medicine, anthropology and history—is examined and the burning questions of the moment in each are proposed. In this process, the contributions which each can make to the new alignment become obvious. Equally, the limitations upon the new alignment are exposed, and the paper ends with a note of caution.

Civil and uncivil war

War in the end of the century is most frequently civil (intra‐state) in its cause, and usually most uncivil in its manner of conduct. Late‐twentieth century uncivil war has two leading characteristics: it neither recognises any value or humanity in the enemy, nor does it distinguish between war and crime. Yet it is confronted by a countervailing force in the form of an emergent regime of enforceable human rights. Peace enforcement now largely supercedes peacekeeping as the international community improvises ways to give effect to the Nuremberg Tribunals principles.

Conventional force restructuring and arms control: A trailer for forthcoming attractions in this theatre

F. Barnaby, The Automated Battlefield. New York: The Free Press, 1986. Pp.185;

Arms Control: Lessons Learned and the Future

18.95. R. Berg and A.D. Rotfeld, Building Security in Europe: Confidence ‐Building Measures and the CSCE. New York: Institute for East‐West Security Studies, 1986. Pp.iii + 181; paperback; NP. A. Pierre (ed.), The Conventional Defense of Europe: New Technologies and New Strategies (Europe/America series No.5), New York and London: New York University Press, 1986. Pp.xii + 185;

Disease at the crossroads: Towards a history of therapeutics in Bulozi since 1876 [1]

19.50.

The end of the beginning of African history

In a fairly regular cycle over the last fifteen years the western public has been offered a standard view of arms control by western politicians, amplified by the western press typically in breathless reportage of arms control negotiations. This view is that the nuclear arms race is not nice, that somehow it should be halted and that whatever particular set-piece of summitry or further episode of complicated Geneva negotiation is imminent is the last, best hope of humanity to achieve that halt. The Reagan administration signalled public endorsement of this goal for arms control when it changed SALT to START: Limitation to Reduction. Is this view correct, either as an historical statement of past arms control or as a realistic prescription for arms control in the future? A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words.

Notes Toward the Definition of Global Security

Abstract This article advances two different types of argument. The first is general and attaches to the fundamental methodology of African history. It derives from the observation that it is extremely difficult to learn much reliably about intellectual history in tropical Africa and that this is largely because of the pervasiveness of manipulation, both conscious and unconscious, in the sorts of data typically available (for example those relating to formal religious practices) through the sorts of technique typically practised (archival research mingled with a greater or lesser degree of direct observation). The article suggests how and why a study of medical cosmology may be a particularly reliable medium in which to perceive the centrally important principles of a culture. The second type of argument is specific and addresses the nature of therapeutic practice and belief in western Zambia (central Africa) over the last century. Three converging perspectives are offered: one presents an abstracted analysis of theories of disease; the second offers a brief narrative of medical pluralism in Bulozi since 1876: the last gives a tentative sketch of the changing epidemiological history of the country during the same period. Together they argue that the introduction of allopathic therapy has not falsified belief in the pre-existing systems of diagnosis and explanation, but that therapeutic systems of radically differing conceptual origin can and do coexist. However, if the colonial century brought new sorts of therapy, evidence is adduced to suggest that it has also brought new patterns of disease. The first two of these converging perspectives are supported in part by three different types of case history, illustrated in each of the three Appendices. The way in which these data are employed illuminates the methodology which underpins the first, general, argument of the paper: that studies of medical theory and practice, especially in the taxing circumstances of a non-Western society, are reliable guides to the nodes of culture and are therefore to be preferred as first steps when little or nothing is known about intellectual history.